Travel Talk is a new Sosauce blog series in which we chat with our favorite travel experts about celebrating the saucy side of travel. With such successful experiences in travel media, we want to highlight their journeys from turning a passion for wanderlust into a profession, their travel plans for 2010, and how they document and share their own travel experiences.

You can read our previous Travel Talk traveler spotlights here.

Venessa Paech, Lonely Planet

Today we are highlight Venessa Paech, Community Manager at Lonely Planet. Venessa is an Australian native and certified Travel Geek who embraces global curiosity in the digital age. Read our interview with Venessa below see where she is traveling to next, what inspires her at Lonely Planet, and her thoughts on social media in the travelsphere.

How is the New Year treating you so far? What are your upcoming travel plans for 2010?

2010 is flying by! Last year was a downer for a lot of people, myself included. The New Year has already trumped it; I’ve been busy and productive, meeting amazing people, working on exciting projects and having way too much fun. As for travel… I’m off to Singapore for a conference in April (I’ve never been, so I’m looking forward to it) and I hope to visit Brighton in the UK later in the year to collect the Masters degree I’ve been working on.

How did you find a career that incorporated your passion for travel?

I was never interested in travel as a career, though I’ve always been curious about the world. I knew I wanted to work in online community – in digital culture – and work for an organisation that I could easily, honestly champion. Lonely Planet’s driving philosophy that travel is a force for good resonates deeply with me and they truly ‘get’ community and social media (it’s a rare thing). The fact that I’m immersed in conversation and content about extraordinary places is icing on the cake.

Sosauce loves Lonely Planet for believing in a similar travel motto: travel with a purpose and expand cultural enrichment. If you agree, meet Travel Geeks who share this belief at the Sosauce community.

Previous to becoming a staff member at LP, where did you travel? How did you then get involved with Lonely Planet?

I’ve spent time in Papua New Guinea and a lot of time in America, where I went to university (30 states down, 20 to go!). I lived in Manhattan for a number of years and have visited other iconic cities, like Paris and London. I’ve been through Wales, Kuala Lumpur, Dubai, New Zealand, Fiji and all of Australia’s capitals. I grew up in Australia’s Northern Territory and have spent time in some breathtaking communities and landscapes up there.

As a traveller I had used Lonely Planet books and loved the Thorn Tree forum. I was on the lookout for opportunities in community management and a new role came up at Lonely Planet. Needless to say – pounce!

Looking for inspiration on your next trip? Visit the Sosauce Guide for travel itinerary ideas, destination reviews, photo galleries, and more!

What have your experiences been like to travel solo, with a friend or boyfriend, in a group, and with family?

I enjoy a bunch of different experiences. I’d get bored travelling only one way. I’ve travelled with all of the above, and had both good and less than good times during each journey. Travelling on your own can be a liberating experience. You’ll make connections you’d never make travelling with company. Travelling with a partner can be blissful too. I probably like travelling with family or in a group least. Too many competing priorities can distract from being in the moment and getting the most out of your trip.

Some prefer to write, others take photos. How do you like to recreate and share your travels?

I’ve gone through phases. I was a big journal writer for a long time, hand writing pages upon pages. I still diarise occasionally, but these days I spend so much time online that I use social networking tools to share photos and impressions with friends. I’m a souvenir fan too – always looking for a suitable memento of my time in a place. I like stuff that’s a little outside the box, something more authentic, oddball even, than cheap and commonplace. If all of that fails, I find mime and interpretative dance works well to reconstruct the highlights of a trip.

Browse the Sosauce Store to create your own travel souvenirs such as mugs, photo prints and frames, and luggage tags. No better way to remember your travel experiences than with a personalized item!

As Community Manager for Lonely Planet, what do you believe drives travelers to the site?

Most of our site visitors come to get inspired or plan their trips. They’ll explore our destination pages, read our blogs, and check out what our authors have to say about a place. They’ll stop by the Thorn Tree to get personalised feedback on itineraries, packing lists and budgets, and ask those questions that only someone who’s been there can answer. They’ll get great advice and usually find they can share some of their own experience with fellow travellers. The connections that they forge and the social experience of the community keeps people coming back again and again.

That’s my take on things. Better still, you should read this thread where some of our members reflect on what motivates them to visit and contribute to the community. It’s their world, we support it.

What can travelers expect to find on the Lonely Planet “Thorn Tree” forums?

They’ll find the oldest, most prolific and well seasoned travel community on the web. The Thorn Tree celebrates its 14th birthday in 2010, which we think is pretty awesome.

The forums themselves are divided up into regions (South America, the Middle East, etc) and themes, like Travel Tech, Get Stuffed (our foodie community) or Speaking in Tongues (the resident linguaphiles). We also have exclusive chat branches where members gather to shoot the breeze about anything and everything. That’s where the real stuff of ‘community’ happens. We’ve seen a great many friendships, a few marriages and even some Thorn Tree kids over the years!

Newcomers should find a passionate, colourful, authentic community of real travellers across every walk of life. They’ll hopefully find the answers they’re looking for and a chance to mentor another traveller if they wish. They find my fabulous team ready to help them out. And they’ll find a twig or a branch that feels like home.

At its heart the Thorn Tree is still an old fashioned forum, and our members tend to appreciate that. While we’ve had to upgrade bits and pieces over the years, we’ve tried to ensure our people and purpose remains intact. I think there’s something strangely noble about the Tree for that reason.

What have been some of the most popular destination guides on Lonely Planet?

Our most popular selling destination guides include Thailand, Japan, Australia, India, Italy and South East Asia on a Shoestring (now in its 36th year of publication would you believe!) They’re all a hit with our online visitors too.

We see spikes in attention at certain times, as you would expect. Interest in Canada has surged around the Vancouver Olympics, and tragedies like the recent earthquakes in Haiti and Chile also bring people to our website to learn more about that place, and often to connect with fellow travellers or locals within our community.

What’s the most unique travel story you remember hearing from your community?

Such a hard question! Every day there’s so many of them. I interviewed one of our most dedicated members last year, Elsie, about her extraordinary travels and relationship with Nepal. She celebrated her 75th birthday on Mount Everest! Another member recently wrote to us asking for us to dig up a message of theirs from May 2000 where they had responded to a request for a travel companion. They met up with the poster and a decade later they’re married with kids and still travelling. This member wanted the original post to frame as an anniversary gift. We regularly feature travel tales from the community on our homepage and our community blog.

With a social media-oriented job, how have you observed the changing landscape of independent travel?

I don’t think our core behaviors have changed very much. We’ve always asked the people in our life – friends, family, and colleagues – for ideas about where to travel. We solicit recommendations from our social networks. Those networks are played out on different tools now, and what may have been a conversation between a couple of people can now be shared between hundreds, even thousands of others. There’s great benefit in exposure to those shared conversations and exchanges.

I think our relationship to information is certainly changing in the digital age. We’re generally hungrier for details and like to have them at our fingertips wherever possible. We’re getting more accustomed to local perspectives informing our choices and we’re more intrigued with the ‘long tail’ of a place; where is that restaurant only the locals know about? We’re less interested in being a tourist and more interested in immersion from different points of view.

Our desire for new possibilities extends to the types of travel products we buy. We know we don’t have to settle for what the travel agent tells us any more, or the most mainstream option. We’re discovering all sorts of local providers offering value-rich alternatives.

On the web, we’re consuming reviews from travellers just like us. The upside is a diversity of opinion and greater relevance for our situations. The downside is UGC websites are haven for spammers, touts and other people who use lower barriers to entry to try and trick travellers. So we’re learning about what trust and reputation means online and working to get the balance right between authoritative content and non-vetted user content.

Mobile and real-time culture has also had a profound impact on independent travel. I know people who are venturing off on their first overseas trip alone who are much less anxious because they’ve got their Google map and travel app laden iPhone along as a passenger. With real-time information, assistance or local intelligence is your pocket, you’ll be more confident on the road.



Thanks to Venessa for giving us the inside scoop behind Lonely Planet’s community. Connect with her on Twitter or browse the Thorn Tree forums for travel tips.

Sosauce wants to be your home for recreating and sharing travel experiences. If you are interested in becoming a community member or contributing blogger, please email us for more information.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 at 5:46 PM and is filed under Spotlight, Traveler. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.